The goal of data visualization is to use images to improve our understanding of a dataset, drawing on techniques from mathematics, computer science, cognitive and perception science, and physics. In this introductory text, the author provides a compact introduction to the field that allows readers to learn about visualization techniques. The material focuses on those techniques and methods that have a broad applicability in visualization applications, occur in most practical problems in various guises, and do not demand a specialized background to be understood. However, the author has also included a number of less mainstream visualization techniques. With these methods, the book gives the reader an idea of the large variety of applications of data visualizations, illustrates the wide range of problems that can be tackled by such methods, and emphasizes the strong connections between visualization and related disciplines such as imaging and computer graphics.

Alexandru C. Telea is Assistant Professor of Visualization and Computer Graphics at the Department of Computer Science of the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. Since 2000 he has been working at the crossroads of data and information visualization, computer graphics, and software engineering. His recent research focus is software visualization, where he is working on techniques and tools that combine new parsing, interaction and rendering techniques to provide insight in industrial software projects of multimillion lines of code. He has co-authored over 80 scientific papers in national and international journals and conferences.